RASUWA, Jan 4:
At a time when most parts of the country, including the capital, are reeling under 12 hours of power outage every day, people in some villages of Rasuwa district, just 90 kilometers from Kathmandu, enjoy uninterrupted power suppy.
Even in the winter season, when all rivers dry up increasing load-shedding to 14 hours a day, some villagers in Rasuwa enjoy uninterrupted power supply. Apart from occasional interruptions in power supply, they never have to spend their nights in darkness. Thanks to micro-hydropower projects, they are free of load-shedding.
“We have heard of load-shedding; but we do not know how it feels to live with it,” says Tenjing Tamang, a local resident of Briddim, a scenic village of Rasuwa.”We did not depend on the government to provide us with electricity. Instead, we developed micro-hydropower projects on our own.”
Today, as many as five villages of Rasuwa, including Bridim, have enough micro-hydropower projects to meet their energy needs. Besides Bridim, people in villages like Haku, Langtang, Thumman and Dandagaun, all of them remote, have also developed micro-hydropower projects on their own.
Until seven years ago, people in Thumman village have no electricity-facility at all. They used to light oil lamps in the night. Tourists passing through Thumman would refuse to spend nights there due to lack of electricity. Then, the Thumman villagers built a hydropower. Well-off families provided donations while others contributed labor. They have now generated 25-kilowatt electricity from Palpushe khola.
“Now, tourists do not hesitate to stay here, we greet them with our own products,” says Phurpu Tamang, a local resident of Thumman village. He says micro-hydropower has changed their lives. “Earlier, we used to wander far-off collecting fuel-wood,” says he. “Now, we can use electric heaters to cook meals.”
In Rasuwa, two mega-hydropower projects have been built so far. Electricity generated from these two projects has been linked to the national grid of the Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA). However, due to the lack of transmission lines and roads, people of these remote villages always remained deprived of power supply. So, they decided to do it on their own, no longer depending on the NEA.
And the result is: they have now better power supply than those who depend on the NEA. In five villages, around 7,000 households are now directly benefitting from micro-hydropower projects.
Source : Republica
